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In my experience, asking candidates to read and explain someone else's code is a much better indicator than letting them do some whiteboard programming.
by Hermel 11y ago
In my experience, asking candidates to read and explain someone else's code is a much better indicator than letting them do some whiteboard programming.
- vinw 11y agoSimilarly I've found that talking through some deliberately broken code, and what improvements could be made to it, gives a good idea of what a candidate would be like to work with on real problems. It's more about the discussion than the code changes they come up with!
- cwilkes 11y agoAgree 100% especially since that's most of the daily job is fixing up old code that was written in a hurry or for a different circumstance. The ability to see what some code was trying to do and how to fix it and make it extendable and or understandable for future generations is invaluable.
- ryandrake 11y agoThis is a great point. Most programming jobs I've seen are about 10% writing new code and 90% maintaining / fixing / extending old code. I'd rather know that you can jump into a codebase you've never seen and get productive quickly than know that you can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
- whatthefox 11y agoAgreed!